The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music by Pwyll ap Siôn Gann Kyle Potter Keith & Kyle Gann & Pwyll ap Siôn

Author:Pwyll ap Siôn,Gann, Kyle,Potter, Keith & Kyle Gann & Pwyll ap Siôn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2013-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

For the first 159 measures of Nixon in China the violins, violas, and keyboards in the orchestra play rising scales; moreover, for the first thirty of those measures the scales are the same and always rising through one octave. But to these scales, woodwinds add slower scales (about one seventh the speed of the others), bass instruments contribute a series of pedals on A, F, and C, trombones add a little four-note sputter from time to time, and every now and again the whole is punctuated by a high ‘ding.’ You never know when the bass is going to change, how tightly the slower scales will be lapped, when the trombone sputters or the ‘ding’ will appear.32

By 1992, when remote-control penetration in American households reached 90 per cent and when most of the sociological and communications research quoted above was actually in process, this jumpiness had become the manifest content of Adams’s music. His Chamber Symphony, composed in that year, begins with a cowbell articulating a basic beat – but almost immediately everything goes haywire, as bubbling and shrieking woodwinds quickly give way to angular ostinatos cutting independently across the ‘inexorable click’ of an implied trap set.33 This kind of tense, jazzy, dissonant polyrhythm has obvious classical-music antecedents: Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Conlon Nancarrow. But it is also a perfect representation of the turbulent television environment of 1992, as abrasive and jerky as Glass’s 1970s minimalism was glossy and smooth. No longer carried along on one channel’s hypnotic flow, the listener bounces among three or four patterns of metrically clashing programming, at irregular and disjunct rhythmic intervals.

But we can do better. As I noted above, Traudt identifies a common pattern of RCD use, where rapid-fire rhythmic clicking (‘surveillance’) alternates with more sedate, but still syncopated, grazing among a cluster of channels, followed, one presumes, by more surveillance – and so on. Traudt transcribes the running inner narrative generated by users as they watch themselves doing this on videotape:

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